Seema Mehta

Seema Mehta is a political writer for the Los Angeles Times and has been selected to be a Knight-Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan for the 2018-19 academic year. She is currently assigned to the 2018 governor’s race and U.S. Senate contest in California. She previously covered the 2016, 2012 and 2008 presidential campaigns, as well as multiple gubernatorial, Senate and mayoral races. Mehta is a frequent face on television, appearing weekly on MSNBC, as well as on CNN, ABC, BBC and other outlets. She was named one of the top state political reporters in the nation by the Washington Post, completed a media fellowship at Stanford University and served as an alumna-in-residence at Syracuse University. Mehta also contributed to Times’ coverage of the Las Vegas mass shooting that won a 2018 Sigma Delta Chi award for deadline online reporting, as well as the devastating wildfires that won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. She also won a 2008 John Swett award for media excellence for an investigative series about the Santa Ana Unified School District creating false class rosters to qualify for state class-size reduction funding. A graduate of Syracuse University, the East Coast native swore when she joined The Times in 1998 that she would only spend a few years on the Left Coast. Many years, a husband, a house and a few cats later, she can’t imagine living somewhere she couldn’t golf year-round.

Since he first entered politics, Newsom has been backed by a loyal coterie of San Francisco’s wealthiest families, who have provided financial support throughout his career, a Times review of fundraising disclosure reports shows.

Gavin Newsom and John Cox are preparing for a general election battle to decide who will be the state’s next governor, but much of what they plan to focus on has little to do with how either candidate would lead the state.